Nuclear Threats – Past and Present

In a detailed interview Joseph Gerson describes the history of US nuclear forces and the threat they continue to pose. Joseph is director of programs at the American Friends Service Committee and is the author of Empire and the Bomb amongst other works.

Could you describe the current size and posture of US nuclear forces?

Today the U.S. has an estimated 9,400 nuclear weapons, the vast majority of which are strategic nuclear weapons with hydrogen warheads. On average, these have explosive power twenty times greater than the Hiroshima A-bomb which destroyed that city in nine seconds. Roughly 2,300 are operationally deployed, with the remainder stored in the U.S. stockpile and ready to be made fully operational in relatively short order. 

Midst the suffering caused by growing joblessness and housing foreclosures, spending for social services is to be frozen. The military budget, however, is set to reach record heights. Contrary to its commitment to see a nuclear weapons free world, this increase in military expenditures includes increased spending to ensure the “reliability” of the United States’ genocidal nuclear weapons stockpile, possible design of a new nuclear weapons, and a $2 billion increase to expand the country’s nuclear weapons infrastructure and to train engineers and scientists to design and maintain nuclear weapons for decades to come. 

You have described the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as being the first instance of “nuclear terrorism”. Why is the word “terrorism” appropriate in this case?

Among the most sobering elements of political/moral history that I’ve come across was the advice given by the Secretary of War to President Truman. He told the President that between the fire bombings of Japanese cities (the U.S. burnt more than 60 Japanese cities to the ground, and having run out of major targets was fire bombing smaller cities. In a single night the firebombing of Tokyo claimed 100,000 lives) and plans to use the A-bombs, the United States ran the risk of appearing to compete with Hitler in atrocities. They knew what they were doing to innocent human beings.

Single bombs destroyed two cities that had been kept off the fire bombings’ target list in order to display the destructive power of the new atomic bombs. In each case, the cities were destroyed in 9 seconds. In the first second, people within a two-mile radius were poisoned with radiation. More were soon irradiated with black rain. 200,000 victims of the A-bombs were dead by year’s end. Those in the immediate proximity of the epicenters were simply vaporized, their remains incapable of being found. Hundreds of thousands of the “survivors” suffered radiation diseases, and in many cases died premature deaths. Genetic damage caused by radiation led to the births of “jelly babies” and many others with mutations and deformities. In many cases the “babies” came into the world dead or lived only hours or days. There is evidence of genetic damage in the second generation (leading to discrimination, especially in terms of marriage,) and possibly into the third generation.

The U.S. mobilized a powerful propaganda campaign that continues to this day (see among others the cancellation of the Smithsonian’s 50th anniversary Hiroshima-Nagasaki exhibit and its replacement with the simple display of the Enola Gay) to protect U.S. Americans, and much of the world’s population from this information in order to insulate the U.S. nuclear weapons program. Japanese film footage taken in the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki holocausts was kept locked in Pentagon vaults lest “communists” use it as Cold War propaganda against the United States. 

Senji Yamiguchi, one of the most courageous A-bomb survivors, who was quite literally burnt to a crisp, survived more than 20 surgeries and two suicide attempts (not uncommon for A-bomb survivors) and in 1954-’55 was among the few outcast and suffering A-bomb survivors who created the Hibakusha movement, used this term shortly after the 9-11 attacks. He said that the Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bombings were the worst practice of terrorism in human history. It’s difficult to disagree with him..

If you do your research, you will find that in late 1944 and 1945 senior U.S. military leaders and Emperor Hirohito knew that Japan was essentially defeated. The Emperor had instructed his diplomats to attempt to negotiate an end to the war that would ensure that he remained on the throne – which they did – and senior figures like Secretary of War Stimson advised President Truman that Japan’s surrender could be arranged on “terms acceptable to the United States.” Which is to say there was no military justification for the A-bombings.

Earlier in the war, U.S. leaders had wanted the Soviet Union to join the war against Japan following the defeat of the Nazis in Europe. As that defeat approached, and it became clear that the U.S. had no choice but to share post-war influence with the Soviets in Europe, U.S. leaders had second thoughts about wanting Stalin to join the war in Asia, which they had pledged to do on August 15.

While there were a number of motives that led to the A-bombingss, the Truman Administration’s prime concern was the Soviet Union. (Note, as early as 1943, when Joseph Rotblat joined the Manhattan Project as a senior scientist, the director of the Project General Leslie Groves informed him that the bomb project was not about Germany – the U.S. knew Germany could not build an A-bomb in time to affect the outcome of the war – it wasn’t about Japan. It was about the Soviet Union.)

The bombs target criteria required that they be on cities with “densely packed workers homes.” They were used to bring the war to an immediate end by sending a powerful psychological message to Japan’s leadership. In this way, U.S. officials believed, they would not have to share influence with the Soviet Union in northern China, Manchuria, Korea, and potentially in Japan itself. It would also, they believed, send a terrifying message to Stalin and other Soviet leaders, thus assuring U.S. global dominance in the post-war period. As Truman put it, with the atomic bomb he would “have a hammer over those boys.”

The repressive nature of North Korea is rarely put in the context of repeated nuclear threats by the United States. Could you outline those threats and their context?

Given the fundamental evils of nuclear weapons, and the death and suffering they cause even when not detonated (see the suffering and deaths of uranium miners, those involved in manufacturing nuclear weapons, fall out from testing, the radioactive poisons that cannot be safely stored, and as Gary Wills has recently described the concentration of power that seriously undermines the possibility of democracy) no nation should possess or threaten the use of nuclear weapons.

To understand North Korea’s quest for a nuclear bomb, and that of other nations, it is worth turning again to Joseph Rotblat. In Hiroshima he once explained that because no nation will long tolerate what it experiences as an unjust imbalance of power – in this case terror – the human species faces a stark choice. It can completely eliminate all nuclear arsenals, or witness and suffer their global proliferation. This certainly applies to North Korea, which the United States has threatened with nuclear attack on at least 9 occasions.

Numerous preparations and threats of nuclear attack were made by the U.S. during the Korean war. At one point General MacArthur urged the use of a series of A-bombs along the Chinese-Korean border to transform it into an impassable barrier of radioactive cobalt for generations to come. The weapons were not used because the military concluded that – as it had destroyed 99% of all buildings in North Korea by means of “conventional” weapons - that there were no North Korean targets worthy of nuclear weapons.

Dwight Eisenhower was elected president in 1953, in part on the basis of his pledge to bring the Korean War on an end on U.S. terms. He did so soon after coming to office by publicly threatening the use of nuclear weapons and saying that he would not be restricted by any “gentleman’s agreement” on which weapons would be used or the targets to be attacked. His threat was understood to include Chinese and Soviet targets. This threat, which did achieve its goals, later served as the model for President Nixon in his nuclear threats and extraordinary alert and mobilization of U.S. nuclear forces in 1969.

For decades, U.S. forces along the DMZ were armed with short range “tactical” nuclear weapons, and the troops that manned them understood that they would be killed by these weapons in the first moments of a second Korean War. Threats to annihilate North Korea were made following the Peublo incident, the DMZ ax incident, and by President Clinton shortly after he assumed office. 

Regarding the Cuban missile crisis, you argue contrary to the standard picture that this was not Kennedy’s finest hour but that the US administration was the most dangerous actor in the crisis - bringing the world close to nuclear war. How do you support that claim?

As we learned soon after it was revealed that President Nixon secretly recorded White House meetings, President Kennedy also secretly recorded meetings and listened in on others by recording their ostensibly private conversations. We thus have the tape recorded conversations of the EXCOM, President Kennedy’s war council during the crisis, and of other White House conversations, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff. These have been published.

We can thus read that in the first days after the Kennedy Administration learned that the Soviet Union was secretly installing nuclear armed missiles in Cuba, Robert McNamara and several others initially argued that there was no real military imperative to counter the Soviets with U.S. military threats. It would be, he argued, only a matter of time before the Soviet Union achieved nuclear parity with the United States. There was, of course, pressure from the Pentagon, the CIA, Republican Party leaders, etc. to make a powerful military response. In those first days two considerations led the Kennedy government to go “eyeball to eyeball” with Moscow in a confrontation its members believed carried the likelihood that the U.S. would initiate a nuclear attack at between a third and a half. One was the belief that if the U.S. did not confront the Soviets the psychological (and thus political) impacts would be enormous, devastating U.S influence across Latin America, which the U.S. then dominated more thoroughly than it does today. The second primary consideration, as JFK told his brother was that because he had believed Khrushchev’s lies about not arming Cuba, the President would be impeached if he did not confront the Soviets and win the withdrawal of the Soviet missiles.

As the Missile Crisis moved to its climax, under pressure from General Curtis LeMay (who had led the fire bombings of Japan) and other members of the Joint Chiefs Kennedy pledged that if the Russians didn’t begin their withdrawal of the missiles within 48 hours, he would give the green light for the invasion of Cuba they had prepared and were eager to execute. Unknown to Kennedy and the EXCOM was the fact that the Russians had already armed their tactical nuclear weapons, and they were targeted on – among other places – Guantanamo. Had Khrushchev not backed down (Kennedy did publicly commit that the U.S. would not try to again invade Cuba, as it had attempted with the Bay of Pigs, thus achieving one of Moscow’s two goals for their missile deployments – and secretly agreed to withdraw obsolete U.S. nuclear armed missiles based in Turkey) millions of people would have died.

At the time, the U.S Single Integrated Operational Plan for nuclear war anticipated the deaths of 500 million people in the Soviet Union, China, Albania Western Europe and Japan. The Soviets had few, if any, missiles capable of reaching the United States.

There were other incidents, which I recount in my book, which illustrate that during the crisis President Kennedy did not have complete control over U.S. nuclear weapons or the military itself. Midst the superpower confrontation, these incidents drew the U.S., Soviet Union, and Cuba closer to a catastrophic war. 

Cuban leader Fidel Castro is considered an unqualified hero by some on the left. However in your book you argue that Castro took an extremely aggressive and dangerous stance during the crisis. How did Castro act during the crisis?

Bob Dylan wrote “Don’t follow leaders. Watch parking meters.” We have to acknowledge and address reality as it is. As the crisis moved toward its climax, and Fidel Castro fully expected a U.S. invasion and reconquest of Cuba, he cabled Khrushchev urging him to use the Soviets’ nuclear arsenal to eliminate the U.S. imperialists once and for all, if the U.S. launched its invasion:

“If… the imperialists invade Cuba with the goal of occupying it, the danger that aggressive policy poses for humanity is so great that following that event, the Soviet Union must never allow the circumstances in which the imperialists could launch the first strike against it…”

This frightened Khrushchev, and he ceased consulting with Castro as he proceeded with the secret negotiations with Kennedy that ultimately led to the peaceful diplomatic resolution of the potentially apocalyptic crisis. 

What role do nuclear weapons play for the US today? Given the nature of contemporary enemies of the United States why does the US maintain such a large nuclear force?

The precise role that the U.S. nuclear arsenal will play for the remainder of the Obama era will be announced – in classified form – with the release of the Nuclear Posture Review, now scheduled for March 1. 

At this writing it appears that debates are continuing within the administration over whether or not to retain the first strike policy, for use in cases such as a mounting North Korean or Iranian nuclear threat, or in response to the use of chemical or biological weapons (deadly but not on the order of nuclear weapons) against U.S. troops. 

It should also be noted that with the increased deployment and encirclement of China with so-called “missile defenses” which one former Clinton Administration stated were designed to “neutralize all its missile forces”, and to an increasing extent the deployment of missile defenses on Russia’s periphery, the U.S. is creating a shield to reinforce its first-strike swords, regardless of what is stated in the Nuclear Posture Review.

As I recount in my book, like a robber who points his gun at his victim during an armed robbery, whether or not the trigger is pulled the gun has been used. In similar fashion, since the Nagasaki A-bombing, on more than 40 occasions during international crises and wars the U.S. has used its first-strike arsenal. This arsenal has also served to define the global hierarchy of terror and power, and thus defined the power relations and preserved privileges inherent to the global (dis)order. In essence, the U.S. nuclear arsenal has served as the ultimate enforcer of U.S. post-WWII hegemony.

Even as the Obama Administration publicly declares that it wishes to reduce the importance of the U.S. nuclear arsenal in the country’s security policies, it has reaffirmed its “extended deterrence” policies in East Asia to ensure the status quo as China rises and North Korea remains somewhat unpredictable in East Asia. Similarly, Hillary Clinton and others have been advocating the export of extended deterrence to ensure that Iran is “contained” and thus to reinforce continued U.S. hegemony in the oil-rich Middle East – “the geopolitical center of the struggle for world power” in the words of Eqbal Ahmad.

Given the multiple pressures spurring nuclear weapons proliferation, and the fact that it is now 65 year old technology, non-proliferation and counter-proliferation have become the most important U.S. national security priorities. In order to restore some legitimacy and bargaining power within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty process after the debacles of the Bush years, Obama has stated his commitment to creating a nuclear weapons free future and has begun negotiations for a Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty. Similarly U.S. and Soviet Union negotiations for a START 1 Follow On Treaty, that will result in small reductions of deployed nuclear weapons which will not impact the structures of either nation’s forces or doctrines, is designed to help regain such legitimacy. 

Obama and other elite figures do understand that with the Untied States’ overwhelming superiority in high-tech weapons, and its campaigns to dominate the weaponization of space and cyber space, that in time achieving a nuclear weapons free future may augment rather than undermine the commitment to “Full Spectrum Dominance.” 

How significant is the current danger of nuclear war?

It is important to neither underestimate nor exaggerate the imminence of the next nuclear attack. Daniel Ellsberg is probably correct when he says that the chances of nuclear war are greater today than they were during much of the Cold War, even as the danger of a massive U.S.-Russian thermonuclear exchange has largely – though not completely - receded. It is worth remembering that studies indicate that were India and Pakistan to fight a war in which 50 nuclear weapons were detonated, in addition to the resulting mass murder and devastation, the rest of the world could experience something analogous to nuclear winter. Each of these nations threatened the other with possible nuclear attack during the 1999 Kargil war, and they have been engaged in long-term proxy wars in both Kashmir and Afghanistan.

A combination of rationality, courage and luck have served humanity these past 65 years. Numerous accidents have occurred from flocks of geese and missiles launching weather satellites being mistaken for ICBMs; Computer cartridges in warning systems have been installed improperly and signaled imminent attack, and senior military officers have violated orders from national leaders, all of which have resulted in numerous close calls.

Today, in addition to the possibility of such accidents, as in the past we face the dangers of miscalculations during wars and in the midst of confrontations between nuclear powers. Recall that both Presidents Bush threatened nuclear attack against Iraq if it used chemical or biological weapons against U.S. forces, and when running for president, Secretary of Defense Clinton threatened to “obliterate” Iran if it attacked Israel. Having made such threats publicly, during an armed confrontation U.S. leaders may not believe it to be politically safe to back down.

There is also the possibility that midst a war or crisis Israel might resort to the use of its “Temple Weapons” as Golda Meir threatened to do during the 1973 October War. 

President Obama and significant sectors of the U.S. elite believe that the most immediate danger of a nuclear attack rests in the possibility of a non-state terrorist (or criminal) force stealing or purchasing a suitcase bomb that could destroy a city. They could be right, which among other things points to the importance of negotiating and implementing a Fissile Material Cut Off Treaty. 

Finally there is what may be the most immediate the danger of a dirty bomb. I am hardly the first to imagine the consequences of two sticks of dynamite, being wrapped with low level radioactive waste and detonated on Wall Street. Few people if any would be killed, but the terrorized responses, which would likely be fanned and exploited by those who brought us the Afghan and Iraq Wars and the Patriot Act, could devastate the U.S. economy and pave the way for domestic repression exponentially greater than that which followed 9-11.

What are popular movements doing to eliminate the danger of nuclear war?

Arms control isn’t nuclear weapons abolition. In the past arms control negotiations have often served to quiet domestic opposition to the U.S. and Soviet nuclear weapons programs and to agree on the dimensions in which the next phases or arms races would take place. That said, you can’t get to abolition – even if a nuclear weapons abolition treaty is eventually negotiated – without arms control measures. 

With all of its limitations, a START 1 Follow On Treaty (currently near finalization) will reduce the number of deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons. Expectations are that it will leave at least 1,000 deployed hydrogen warheads on each side. It is widely believed that once the number gets down to about 500, the environment will have been created for multi-lateral disarmament/abolition negotiations. It is thus important to win Senate ratification of START 1 when it is finally brought before the Senate. Similarly, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which would ban all test explosions of nuclear weapons, is seen a critical to moving toward Global Zero.

Demands by Republican, and possibly some Democratic Senators, that in exchange for their ratification votes the Obama administration commit to build and deploy a new nuclear weapons and that it commit even more money to expand the nuclear weapons infrastructure. This would obviously undermine the value of the ratifications.

Coordinated efforts by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, the Arms Control Association, Peace Action. the American Friends Service Committee, and a host of community based organizations in states like New Hampshire, Iowa, Indiana, Utah and Nevada, are working to build political environments in which meaningful ratification votes can be won

Internationally, including here in the United States, the nuclear weapons abolition movement is mobilizing to impact the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference which will be held at the United Nations this coming May. An International Planning Committee, actually a network of 25 organizations in the U.S., Europe, Japan and the Middle East is coordinating a unified campaign to press the Review Conference to mandate the beginning of negotiations for a nuclear weapons abolition treaty, as mandated in Article VI of the treaty and repeatedly called for by the United Nations General Assembly, the Non Aligned Movement and the International Court of Justice (to begin the list.) 

The IPC understands that there are other immediate crises, including the Central Asian and Iraq wars, mass unemployment and foreclosures, and global warming that must be addressed. It also understands that unless we deepen our understandings of the structural inter-relationships of these issues and more deeply integrate our movements, we are unlikely to prevail. As a result, the integration of these issues and struggles has been made central to our organizing and to all of our events.

On February 15, the IPC announced its plans, including that its Disarm Now! call had been endorsed by more than 250 organizations around the world. (see http://www.peaceandjusticenow.org.) They also announced that roughly 2,000 activists from Japan – including Hibakusha – as well as activists from Europe, Asia and the Global South will be coming to New York to press the demand for nuclear weapons abolition negotiations now.  The IPC’s activities include:

1. An international petition campaign, whereby movements in each country would develop a petition text most consistent with their needs, with all petitions calling for the 2010 NPT Review to conclude with a commitment to commence negotiations on a nuclear weapons abolition convention/treaty. The petitions will be presented to the Review Conference during a formal ceremony on the first or second day of the conference.

2. Organization of an international peace conference to be held at the Riverside Church in New York City immediately prior to the NPT Review Conference. It will provide forums for peace, justice and environmental activists from around the world to share information and analyses, to coordinate plans during the month-long NPT Review Conference, and to develop plans for longer term education and organizing

3. Organization of an “International Day of Action for A Nuclear Free World” The primary events will be a mass rally, march and festival in mid-town Manhattan, culminating at the United Nations.

4. Facilitation of an international youth presence during the NPT Review. Hundreds of young activists will be coming from Europe and Japan and are already linking up with young U.S. anti-nuclear organizers and activists involved with Think Outside the Bomb.

Will we prevail in May? Unlikely. But good organizers always recognize the openings and unique opportunities to articulate popular demands and to build our movements to prevail in the longer term.

About this article

Published on 01 March, 2010
By Joseph Gerson